The gold beetle

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The Gold Beetle , early illustration by Herpin

The gold beetle (original title The Gold-Bug ) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe , in which, as part of a treasure hunt, the deciphering of a secret script is explained in detail using the frequency of the individual letters in English texts. The short story was first published in the Dollar Newspaper on June 21 and 28, 1843 . A first translation into German by Alfred Mürenberg was probably published in 1881 in the collection Strange Stories published by Spemann Verlag in Stuttgart.

content

The story begins on Sullivan's Island , where the narrator visits his friend Legrand, who lives in a hut with his released slave Jupiter. Legrand tells the narrator to have made an unusual find: a metallic shimmering scarab . Since Legrand has loaned the beetle to an enthusiastic entomologist , he is forced to make a sketch of the scarab for the narrator on an old piece of parchment that he discovered on the beach. What follows is a confusing scene that results from the narrator recognizing the drawing of a skull instead of a beetle on the parchment. After a few weeks, Jupiter visits the narrator and hands him a letter from Legrand asking for a visit. In addition, the released slave reports that his former master has apparently lost his mind, which Jupiter attributes to the unholy effects of the gold beetle.

When the narrator pays Legrand the desired visit, Legrand, apparently obsessed with gold fever, persuades him to go on a treasure hunt. What follows is a strange odyssey to a tree on the mainland, in the vicinity of which, as Legrand means, the treasure is apparently buried. After Legrand persuaded Jupiter to drop the beetle (which Legrand carried in front of him like a dowsing rod) through the eye socket of a skull attached to a branch of the tree, Legrand discovered a miraculous (and initially flawed) way the point of dig. On the second attempt, the group actually comes across a treasure.

In the second part of the story the strange occurrences are resolved. On the parchment there was obviously a strange character code in secret ink, which became visible again through heat (hence the confusion about the different drawing). Legrand deciphered this character code, which turned out to be a guide to a hidden treasure of the pirate Captain Kidd . The fuss about the gold beetle itself represents nothing more than an elaborate joke by Legrand on the external level of the narrative.

interpretation

Poe was particularly interested in cryptanalysis during the time he was writing for the Alexander Weekly Messenger in Philadelphia . In a competition he challenged his readers to send him monoalphabetic ciphers, all of which he would decipher. Numerous newspaper readers sent him their cryptograms and Poe managed to decipher them all. Poe also published theoretical writings on cipher writing and a short story about cipher writing. The gold beetle that the story tells is a find that the protagonists used to find a treasure. At the same time, the “gold beetle” represents a contemporary debate about the introduction of paper money.

The two levels of decryption are interesting: the lexical level according to the frequency of letters and the semantic level. Literary scholars have understood the “gold beetle” in this context as a linguistic experiment with ambiguities. The potentially racist portrayal of Legrand's former slave Jupiter has also led to literary controversy. The balance of power between Jupiter and Legrand is complex in any case. On the one hand, Jupiter is portrayed as naive and simple-minded and follows Legrand's instructions without initiative (and sometimes incorrectly), on the other hand, he threatens to beat up his former master and worries (sometimes even fatherly) about his mental health.

Also noteworthy is the thesis, advocated by some literary scholars, that the story hides a second code in addition to Legrand's cryptogram. This second code is in the form of an alchemical allegory on the metaphorical level of the story and runs through the entire narrative. When viewed through this lens, the characters' treasure hunt turns into an alchemical experiment, the search for the Philosopher's Stone . Legrand becomes an obsessed alchemist who not only strives for gold, but also for wisdom and knowledge.

Emergence

Poe already knew two literary adaptations of the William Kidd material: Washington Irving's 1824 short story "The Devil and Tom Walker" and Robert Montgomery Bird's 1836 novel Sheppard Lee . He submitted the "Gold Beetle" to the Dollar Newspaper , which had a competition and a $ 100 prize - which Poe eventually won. One condition of the competition was that the venue was America. Poe had his short story begin on Sullivan's Island, which he was able to describe accurately because he was stationed there in 1827/1828 as a soldier.

Poe later made minor changes to a few passages in the 1843 version, which were first printed in an anthology of his stories in 1845.

German translations (selection)

literature

  • W. Gordon Cunliffe: The Gold Bug . In: John V. Hagopian and Martin Dolch (Eds.): Insight I - Analyzes of American Literature . Hirschgraben Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1971, pp. 197-199.
  • Klaas Voß : Legrand's Opus Magnum: The alchemical code in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Gold Bug”. In: Journal of English and American Studies. Vol. 54, No. 4, 2006, ISSN  0044-2305 , pp. 349-364.
  • Michael Williams: "The Language of the Cipher". Interpretation in "The Gold-Bug". In: American Literature. Vol. 53, no. 4, 1982, ISSN  0002-9831 , pp. 646-660.
  • Fred B. Wrixon. Codes, ciphers & other secret languages. From the Egyptian hieroglyphs to computer cryptology. Könemann, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-8290-3888-7 , pp. 177f.

Web links

Wikisource: Tales (Poe) / The Gold-Bug  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Edgar Allan Poe - “The Gold-Bug” - Historical Texts for a detailed description of the publication history . On: The Edgar Allan Poe Society , accessed on February 13, 2016. WorldCat names the probable date of the first publication of the collection Strange Stories by Spemann Verlag 1881 or the following years 1882 and 1883; the Edgar Allan Poe Society , on the other hand, gives the date of the first edition of the translated and edited by Mürenberg. Collection of stories from 1890. Mürenberg's translation is available online in the Internet Archive at archive.org .
  2. ^ Terence Whalen: Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses. The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1999, ISBN 0-691-00199-5 .
  3. ↑ Michael Williams: "The Language of the Cipher". Interpretation in "The Gold-Bug". 1982, pp. 646-660.
  4. ^ Liliane Weissberg: Black, White, and Gold. In: J. Gerald Kennedy, Liliane Weissberg (Ed.): Romancing the Shadow. Poe and Race. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2001, ISBN 0-19-513710-8 , pp. 127-156.
  5. ↑ Barton Levi St. Armand: Poe's "Sober Mystification": The Uses of Alchemy in "The Gold Bug". In: Poe Studies. Vol. 4, No. 1, 1971, ISSN  1947-4644 , pp. 1-7, doi : 10.1111 / j.1754-6095.1971.tb00157.x .
  6. ^ Klaas Voss: Legrand's Opus Magnum: The alchemical code in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug". 2006, pp. 349-364.
  7. ↑ On the origin cf. Notes on the short story in the Haffmans work edition Volume 3, 1994, p. 613ff.
List of the works of Edgar Allan Poe


Poems

Tamerlane (1827) • Song (1827) • Dreams (1827) • Spirits of the Dead (1827) • Evening Star (1827) • Imitation (1827) • Stanzas (1827) • A Dream (1827) • The Happiest Day (1827 ) • The Lake (1827) • Sonnet — To Science (1829) • Al Aaraaf (1829) • Romance (1829) • To - - (1829) • To The River - (1829) • To M— (1829) • Fairy -Land (1829) • To Helen (1831) • Israfel (1831) • The Sleeping Woman (1831) • The Valley of Unrest (1831) • The City in the Sea (1831) • Enigma (1833) • Serenade (1833) • To - (Sleep On) (1833) • Fanny (1833) • The Coliseum (1833) • To One in Paradise (1834) • To Elizabeth (1835) • To Mary (1835) • Bridal Ballad (1837) • To Zante ( 1837) • The Haunted Palace (1839) • Sonnet - Silence (1840) • The Conqueror Worm (1843) • Lenore (1843) • Dream-Land (1844) • Eulalie (1845) • The Raven (1845) • Impromptu. To Kate Carol (1845) • To - (1845) • The Divine Right of Kings (1845) • Stanzas (1845) (1845) • A Valentine (1846) • To ML S— (1847) • Ulalume (1847) • To Marie Louise (1848) • An Enigma (1848) • The Bells (1849) • A Dream Within a Dream (1849) • For Annie (1849) • Eldorado (1849) • To my Mother (1849) • Annabel Lee (1849) • O, tenses! O, Mores! (1868) • Alone (1875)

Volumes of poetry

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) • Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829) • Poems (1831) • The Raven and Other Poems (1845)

Stories

Metzengerstein (1832) • The Duc de L'Omelette (1832) • A Tale of Jerusalem (1832) • Loss of Breath (1832) • Bon-Bon (1832) • MS. Found in a Bottle (1833) • The Appointment (1834) • Berenice (1835) • Morella (1835) • Lionizing (1835) • The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1835) • King Pest (1835) • Shadow - A Parable (1835) • Four Beasts in One - The Homo-Cameleopard (1836) • Mystification (1837) • Silence - A Fable (1837) • Ligeia (1838) • How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838) • A Predicament (1838) • The Devil in the Belfry (1839) • The Man That Was Used Up (1839) • The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) • William Wilson (1839) • The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839) • Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling (1840) • The Business Man (1840) • The Man of the Crowd (1840) • The Double Murder on Rue Morgue (1841) • A Descent into the Maelström (1841) • The Island of the Fay (1841 ) • The Colloquy of Monos and Una (1841) • Never Bet the Devil Your Head (1841) • Eleonora (1841) • Three Sundays in a Week (1841) • The Oval Portrait (1842) • The Mask of the Red Death (1842 ) • The Landscape Garden (1842) • The Secret of Marie Rogêt (1842) • The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) • The Treacherous Heart (1843) • The Gold Beetle (1843) • The Black Cat (1843) • Diddling (1843) • The Spectacles (1844) • A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (1844) • The Premature Burial (1844) • Mesmeric Revelation (1844) • The Long Box (1844) • The Angel of the Odd (1844) • Thou Art the Man (1844) • The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. (1844) • The Stolen Letter (1844) • The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845) • Conversation with a Mummy (1845) • The Power of Words (1845) • The Imp of the Perverse (1845) • The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1845) • The Facts in the Waldemar Case (1845) • The Sphinx (1846) • The Amontillado Barrel (1846) • The Domain of Arnhem (1847) • Mellonta Tauta (1849) • Hopping Frog (1849) • Von Kempelen and His Discovery (1849) • X-ing a Paragrab (1849) • Landor's Cottage (1849)

Other works

Maelzel's Chess Player (1836) • The Daguerreotype (1840) • The Philosophy of Furniture (1840) • A Few Words on Secret Writing (1841) • The Rationale of Verse (1843) • Morning on the Wissahiccon (1844) • Old English Poetry (1845) • The Philosophy of Composition (1846) • The Poetic Principle (1846) • Heureka (1848) • The Balloon-Hoax (1844) • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) • The Journal of Julius Rodman ( 1840) • Politian (1835) • The Conchologist's First Book (1839) • The Light-House (1849)